He was already at her, driving in through a storm of applause from the crowd. She had his measure now. He came from left and right but his stock of moves was limited, the same strikes mirroring each other every time. She began to fend him off, sliding his blades off her own and then turning parries into ripostes, until they were in the middle of their narrow slice of arena, and he was no longer driving her before him. All the while she kept the eating knife poised, glinting in the light, always in his eyeline, always on his mind.
She realized that she had already made up her mind how to end this, perhaps even before she started. Even as she kept him at the length of her rapier, outside his reach, the plan she had not even known about was made plain to her, and she saw that it was good.
She went on the attack, seemed to mis-step. Abruptly she was too close, playing into the range of his blades. He took the chance she offered, by accident or not. She dragged her sword in, moving it like light and shadow, both of his blades skittering off its hand-guard and quillons. The eating knife darted in.
It came from above him for the top of his head, but the voices in his head were shouting for him to watch for it. He twisted faster than she had thought, his blades coming up to catch the blunt knife. She was already a step back and the rapier was inside his guard. With utter delicacy, she struck.
She had intended to pink his shoulder, first blood as Sinon had said, but her blade laid open the side of his neck, and he went down in a startling abundance of red. For a moment she thought he might get up again, leaning on his sword and spitting at her, but then he fell forward, and she knew that he was dead.
Looking down now, with the heat of the moment cooling on her, she realized that she had absolutely no right to beat him. She was, after all, merely a good duellist for the College circuit. With a wood and bronze blade she had been better than most, but worse than some.
With a live blade in her hand, where death was at her shoulder and not just the gain or forfeit of a game, it seemed she had a talent for reddening her blade with other people’s blood. She had not drawn this blade in anger without having a man die over it and yesterday it had taken four of Malia’s men to catch her, even exhausted and confused as she must have been. And she had blooded them all.
She had a talent, for sure. If Sinon had his way, she might even have a vocation. The thought did not sit well with her, but a moment before, with the fierce fire of victory on her, she would have welcomed it.
What am I becoming?
She looked at Halfway. There was a commotion all along the table, some applauding and some cursing her, but in her mind it was just her and the gangster chief here now. She met his strange eyes and her smile, however forced, challenged him.
‘Malia didn’t exaggerate a word of it,’ he said, his followers quieting even as he spoke. ‘In fact, I think she even played it down a little.’ He glanced at the Ant woman, who was looking ever so slightly concerned. Tynisa thought back to their first meeting, and wondered just what might have happened had she herself pushed it to a fight.
Better not to know. They were right when they said she needed them. Everything had gone wrong and her comrades were scattered to the winds. If this gang of murderers and blackguards was her only tool, then she would grasp it by the hilt.
Smiling so sweetly, she cleaned her blade and went to sit beside the giant, just a seat away from Sinon himself.
Elias Monger was a busy man. Rather than leave them in his house to fret, he had suggested that they come to see the leading sights of Helleron with him, such sights consisting of his commercial holdings and factories. Che wondered if he was trying to impress Salma the prince with his wealth and productivity. If so, that plan had fallen at the first hurdle.
Around them, the cavernous space boomed and thundered, as though what they were making here was not crossbow bolts but elemental weather. It was order on a grand scale: the ranks of great forges and presses and tooling machines that were never still, the constant onward progressing, each pair of hands only a tiny part of the grand scheme. The sheer industry of it, the fact that someone had worked all this out, this machined sequence, and then made it real as one of Elias Monger’s factory floors, was beyond Che’s ability to conceive.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘I thought you Beetles didn’t keep slaves.’ Salma’s bleak gaze took in the long, gloomy, toiling room and found little in it he liked.
‘Slaves?’ Che said blankly. ‘These aren’t slaves.’
‘Aren’t they?’
She put her hands on her hips. ‘No, they aren’t. They’re here to earn a wage. They’re here of their own free will. You’re just saying that because you don’t understand what they’re working at.’
‘Free will?’ Salma saw, in that long room, more people than he could readily count. They were almost shoulder to shoulder at the benches, each repeating some action over and over. Some were tending pole-lathes, others shaping shards of chitin. Some at the back fed a row of forges whose red glow shed more light than the grime-covered windows. Others poured molten metal into moulds, and others still honed the edges of the tiny pieces resulting, or freed them from the casts. Each man or woman had a fragment of a job, performed over and over. Each was utterly absorbed by it, working as fast as they could, passing over forever to the next pair of hands in line. Salma wondered what would happen if, in their same free will, they decided not to work.
‘Oh, lose the long face,’ Che snapped at him, annoyed. ‘So they don’t do things this way in the Commonweal. This is industry, Salma. This is how things happen in the Lowlands. We can’t all spend three years making the perfect sword or whatever.’
‘I don’t think I can stay in here,’ Salma said. ‘I’m going to wait over by the door where there’s light and air.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she said, nettled. He caught her gaze as he turned, though, and something must have communicated itself to her. Looking back across the room there was a moment, just a moment, when she saw the hundreds of labouring bodies and wondered: free will, yes, but how many of them had a family an eighth of an inch from starving? How many had come to Helleron to make their fortunes and now could not afford to leave?
At the far end of the factory were stacked bundles of crossbow bolts being carefully counted by an overseer. Each day this one factory shipped hundreds of them, made for a price nowhere in the Lowlands could match. Business was not good enough for Uncle Elias, though. Clearly some part of his grand machine was not keeping pace with the rest.
‘I don’t care how you do it,’ she heard him complain as she approached. ‘Hire more workers or get this lot to work faster, but we’re down almost five parts per hundred, and the orders just keep mounting up. I want next tenday’s turnover to be the same as the last, and the tenday after to be even better.’
The Ant foreman nodded glumly. ‘It will be done.’
‘Good.’ Elias turned to see Che. ‘How do you like my factory?’
‘It’s very impressive, uncle.’ She had begun calling him that, rather than cousin, because he was Stenwold’s age.
‘What does your friend think?’
‘I don’t think he’s really used to it,’ she said.
‘Well, the Commonwealers never were good customers. A bit snobby about their own craftsmanship, if you ask me.’ Elias shrugged. ‘It’s always the same with the Inapt: they want everything handcrafted to thousand-year-old techniques that take forever, and then wonder why everyone else has a bigger army.’